Teaching Math, Writing, Spelling, & Reading with Special Needs: As a Bird Builds Its Nest, So We Teach

“‘Little by little, the bird builds its nest,’ is the translation of one of my daughter’s favorite French phrases. This encourages us to teach step by step and with sensitivity to the student. Will he thrive in a traditional classroom? Does he require a smaller group of companions? Will he need private tutoring? Does he need visual aids, adaptive equipment, more practice? As a matter of human compassion and pedagogical duty, we can make modifications for the various needs of our students.”

If any lesson contains too much content, use a mental magnifying glass to enlarge each component. Then divide into smaller parts and teach those.

Consider our Simply Classical Curriculum, Voted #1 for Special Learners, with lesson plans to help you teach any child for success, little by little. Hear from a satisfied mother:

I am literally in awe of the cohesiveness and thoughtfulness in each piece of the curriculum. A typical learner will make connections in a language-rich environment with access to books and a loving caregiver, but children with developmental delay need explicit training and over-teaching to grasp foundational concepts. For instance, I just assumed my child would understand the 5 senses. I almost skipped it. He’s 5 and we’ve read scores of books and raised him in a language-rich environment. It baffled me that it took him about 3 weeks to fully cement that we see with our eyes, hear with our ears, smell with our nose, taste with our tongue and touch with our fingers. Simply Classical Level B lovingly over-taught this concept, then they had us read The Poky Puppy. His comprehension of the story is significantly different from when we had read this story last summer. The explicit teaching of number sense, prepositions, elements of nature, body parts review and animal identification (which is still an emerging skill for my guy) were all directly taught prior to this read-aloud. And now that I’m teaching my eldest from SC Curriculum, I see how they are laying the groundwork for concepts he’ll visit in the upper grades. — Larissa

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